Royal Bastards

by Roger Powell

  Another possibility is that Lucy accompanied Charles during his journey from Paris into the Spanish Netherlands post July 1654. His first port of call was Cambrai, followed by Mons, Namur and then by water to Leige before moving on to Spa where he was joined by his sister Mary; from there he visited Aachen on 7 September 1654 and then Aix-la-Chapelle. If so, Mary could have been conceived between 18 July 1654 and November 1654. However, Lucy’s movements are unknown during this period and her sudden appearance in Cologne in December of that year, with Sir Henry de Vic, suggests that she was not in close contact with the King.

  Curiously the author of the DNB article on Lucy Walter, despite his unreliability, is quite specific about the alleged day, month and place of Mary’s birth. In the light of subsequent research it is just possible that he was right on those points – 6 May at The Hague. If she was indeed born on 6 May 1655 then she was clearly conceived at the beginning of August 1654 when Lucy was briefly at Leige. However, Daniel O’Neill’s reference to ‘your wife and children’ in his letter to Charles II from London dated 8 March 1654/5, could perhaps be used to discredit a birth date of May 1655, assuming of course that he is alluding to Lucy and her children and that he was not writing in code.

  Contemporary opinion about Mary’s parentage was also divided - one source, Anthony à Wood, stating

  ‘You are to know that the said Mrs Walters gave out that the said King (Charles II) did begat on her body a daughter, but because he would not own her, I shall not number her among the children’.

  However, another source, Michael Deane, a Cromwellian spy who used the pseudonym B. Marshall, reported that ‘Madam Barlow … bore Charles Stuart two children’. Ann Hill, Lucy Walter’s maid, who had entered her service in August 1655 at The Hague, also stated that ‘those children she had were begotten by Charles Stuart’.

  Why Lucy chose to summon her maid at that particular point is intriguing. Had Lucy just given birth? If that was indeed the case then we are looking at a conception date of around the beginning of November 1654, when Sir Henry de Vic was in tow. In January 1655/6 Charles finally pensioned Lucy off with the promise of a yearly sum of 5,000 livres, the occasion for doing this being presumably the knowledge that she may have been pregnant with another man’s child. Tom Howard does not come into the picture until after the birth of Mary, when Daniel O’Neile reported on 14 February 1656/7 that ‘the infamous manner of hir living with Mr Howard and of her miscarrying of two children by phissick ‘.

  The belief that Mary’s father was the Earl of Carlingford, comes from the Carte Mss:

  ‘… she [Lucy Walter] had at same time a child by E. Carlingson (sic) who grew up to be a woman and owned by the mother to be her’s and as like the E.C as possible’.

  The brief reference to ‘scurrilous stuff about Lord Taff and Mrs Barlow’ in the correspondence of Lord Hatton is intriguing but hardly evidence of a physical relationship. Undoubtedly the Earl was Mary’s guardian, for there is contemporary evidence to support the fact (see Calendar of State Papers 1680).

  James II’s assertion that she was the Earl’s child was probably politically motivated and intended to discredit the rumour that Lucy had been married to King Charles and that her children were therefore legitimate. How important it was for him to do so can be appreciated by the fact there were at least two contemporary references to the Duke of Monmouth and his sister touching for the King’s Evil (see Luttrell’s Diary 21 Jan 1680) for only legitimate members of the royal family could do this.

  Whilst it is true that Charles II did not publicly acknowledge Mary, he did provide her with a pension. Later she would complain that the pension was ‘not ner so much as he was pleased to alowe me when I was but a child’. Is she perhaps referring to the pension of 5,000 livres (£400) granted to her mother on 21 January 1655/6 or a separate pension granted after her mother’s death? Of course, another child that Charles did not publicly recognise, but who also received a modest pension was Charlotte, the Countess of Yarmouth (see page 44). But if the Earl of Carlingford really was Mary’s father, why then did he not provide her with a pension? As there is evidence illustrating Carlingford’s role as an intermediary between Charles and Lucy Walter during the years immediately prior to Mary’s birth, it is unsurprising to find him taking on the role of guardian, presumably on Charles’s instructions, for Mary after her mother’s death. Charles’s reason for not acknowledging either child is curious, but in Mary’s case may perhaps have been due to the possible political repercussions.

  The contemporary documentation recording Mary’s life gives some indication of her character and a surviving portrait shows that she had fine black eyes, regular and pleasing features and black hair. In many respects you can see the strong resemblance to her brother the Duke of Monmouth (see page 36). By all accounts she was a placid and long suffering woman, who was ill used by both her husbands, with none of the fire and determination of her mother and brother. Indeed Monmouth did not think much of his sister at all and refused to acknowledge her second marriage for a number of years after the event.

  Mary’s first marriage to William Sarsfield, was motivated purely by financial gain. Sarsfield was anxious to regain possession of his Irish estates which had been confiscated during the Civil War and he proposed to King Charles that if he granted him the quit rents of his estates to the value of £160, he would settle on his wife a jointure of £800. The King duly obliged, but he made it abundantly clear that it

  ‘was solely and absolutely done by us for the benefit of the said Mary and her children by the said Mr Sarsfield’.

  Unfortunately Sarsfield did not keep to his part of the bargain, and when he died, he only left his wife an allowance of £200 per annum. When Charles realised how ill used she had been, he promised her a pension of £600 per annum, but this was stopped by the Earl of Danby during one of the Government’s recurrent financial crises. To add insult to injury, Sarsfield’s will directed that his infant children were to be placed in the charge of his mother, she being a Protestant, and not his widow.

  Within five months of her husband’s death, Mary had married her second husband, William Fanshaw, who was a great crony of the Earl of Rochester. Again the motive appears to have been for financial gain. They had a least five children and at the birth of the eldest, Henry Savile wrote:

  ‘I thought there could be but one lame thing upon this earth in perfect happiness and that is Fanshaw for his having a daughter, a princesse, who yet remains in paganisme for want of baptism, which the fond father delayes to take some prudent resolution concerning the godfather. He thinks the King ought to be kept for a sonn & the D of Monmouth does not yet owne the alliance enough to hold his néece at the font etc ‘.

  However, despite Mary’s royal connections, her pension was never paid regularly with the result that Fanshaw had to petition the Treasury repeatedly for assistance; but between 1680–84 he received £1,400 in bounty payments from the King.

  Until 1686, Mary remained a Catholic, but when her second husband persuaded her to become a Protestant, King James stopped his pension of £400 a year. For reasons unknown, King Charles had dismissed him from his post of Master of the Revels and Commissioner of the Alienation Office. For the most part, Mary remained in the background, but her husband always took every opportunity he could to advance himself and was often seen at Nell Gwyn’s house. He also gained a reputation as a ladies man and was reported to have passed on the result of his infidelities to his poor wife. A contemporary Henry Saville reported that

  ‘The other day Mr Fanshaw came & made a third with us, but will have his worse pox then ours passe for the scury out of civilty to his lady though the rogue bee a filthyer leaper than ever was cured in the gospell & without another pool of Bethesda or another Saviour hee is the most incurable animall that now crawles upon the earth.’

  However, in 1681 Mary burst into the public eye, when it was claimed that the previous year she had cured one Jonathan Trott, a poor man, of the King’s Evi
l. Trott, it is claimed,

  ‘went to Mrs Fanshaw’s house near St James’s ‘ and as soon as ever Mrs Fanshaw appear’d ‘falling on his knées, he begged her to pardon him. ‘Then, grasping her hands with all the violence and passion imaginable, kissed them a thousand times, and directed ‘em to his neck, and this throat and all other parts of his body wherein he was afflicted ‘ etc, within 3 days he was cured.’

  The witnesses to this were Lord Gerard, Sir Gilbert Gerard, Col. Langley, Thomas Vernon, Mr Rowe and Mrs Néedham and the incident produced at least one satirical verse:

  ‘Fanshawe’s Princes posted after

  to take the place of ye Kings Daughter

  Which Royal Priviledge she gott

  By gently stroaking Mr Trot’

  The declaration cannot have pleased King Charles, regardless of whether Mary was an innocent party in the affair. It was to all intents and purposes a declaration of her legitimacy and must have caused him grave embarrassment. He had already made three public declarations in 1679 and 1680 that he was never married to Lucy, but still the rumour persisted.

  Sadly, Mary’s life was cut short when she died suddenly in April 1693 aged only 38. When Will Fanshaw died in 1707, he sought to atone for some of his past behaviour by requesting that he be buried beside ‘his dearly beloved wife’ in Barking Church.

  Chapter XIV

  Hanoverian Loose Ends

  Frederick, Prince of Wales (son of King George II) (1707–51): Mary Allbeary (or Aubury)(d. 1787)

  Little is known about Mary Allbeary (also known as Aubury), but what information there is, came originally from the late Sir Robert Mackworth-Young, KCVO, Librarian of Windsor Castle Library who corresponded with Cecil Humphery-Smith.

  Mary was alleged to be a daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales, born of an undisclosed mother. She was married on 25 August 1764 at Fort St George, Madras to Henry Brooke (1725–86) and she died twenty-three years later on 12 August 1787 at Dublin, leaving a daughter, Catherine. It is said that Catherine married in 1776 Richard FitzGerald, although this would suggest that if Catherine herself was legitimate, she can only have been eleven years of age at most upon marriage.

  Frederick was the eldest son of George II but died during his father’s lifetime. He was the father of King George III and of four additional sons and four daughters, by his wife Princess Augusta youngest daughter of Frederick II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg.

  Prince George of Hanover, later Prince of Wales, later King George III (1763) (1738-1820): George Rex (1765-1839)

  For the last two hundred years or more, there has been a continuing and widespread belief that George Rex, of Knynsa, in Cape Province, South Africa, the first owner and settler of Knysna and sometime a Marshal and Sergeant-at-Mace of the Vice Admiralty Court at the Cape of Good Hope, was the son, legitimate or illegitimate, of Prince George of Wales, who later became King George III, by The Fair Quaker, Hannah Lightfoot, to whom, some claim, he had been married.

  The belief extended to the fact that in 1797 George Rex had been secretly banished to South Africa by a worried king (as he had become thirty-seven years earlier), who by that time had a legitimate brood of his own by his Queen, Princess (Sophia) Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whom he had married on 8 September 1761, a fortnight before his Coronation. It is said that he was keen therefore to remove any possible source of embarrassment and so provided George Rex with a sinecure as a Marshal and Sergeant-at-Mace of the Vice Admiralty Court at the Cape of Good Hope as well as with an estate of some 24,000 acres at Knysna, and various family souvenirs and mementoes, on condition that he destroyed any records of his early life and never spoke of his origins, and that he never married, nor returned to England, dead or alive. Many of his numerous descendants firmly believe all this to be true.

  During this period, no less than a dozen books and articles have been written about George Rex as well as a number of television documentaries. Whilst there is no doubt at all that George Rex existed, that he emigrated to South Africa, that he served as Marshal and Sergeant-at-Mace of the Vice Admiralty Court and that he lived and prospered at Knysna, there has been much controversy as to whether or not this belief was true, supported as it was by various circumstantial evidence, but with no hard proof.

  However, the most recent and perhaps the most objective and thorough work on the subject is by Patricia Storror, called George Rex: Death of a Legend, and published by Macmillan South Africa in 1974. She has come down firmly on the side that George Rex was not the son of Prince George and Hannah Lightfoot, but was the son of George and Sarah Rex, of London. Nevertheless as there has been so much controversy and speculation over the last two hundred and forty years, it seems right to include him under Royal Loose Ends, if only to set the record straight once and for all.

  A certain amount of circumstantial evidence, when taken together, had suggested that George Rex might have been born prior to 1760 and that he was the son of Prince George of Wales who was shortly to succeed his grandfather as King George III. The mother was said to have been Hannah Lightfoot, known as The Fair Quaker, who was born in 1730 and whom some claim had married George on 17 April 1759 in Kew Chapel when he would only have been fifteen years old. However, this seems unlikely, for Hannah herself is now known to have married Isaac Axford on 11 December 1753 in Keith’s Chapel, Curzon Street, in London, whereupon she appears to have been abducted, never to be seen again. It is likely that she died between 1758–59, but had she married George and had she survived, the effect of such a marriage, if it had taken place, would have been to render illegitimate all fifteen of George’s children by his official wife, Queen Charlotte. Moreover, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography demolishes the idea that Hannah had had any issue by King George III and indeed questions whether they had ever met.

  So quite simply, the dates do not add up. Nor indeed do the various fragments of circumstantial evidence, when examined individually, especially in the light of the recent discovery of George Rex’s parentage and legal career, by which the whole legend has been comprehensively rebutted. For in her book, Patricia Storror outlines the research conducted by Professor Ian Christie who established that George Rex was born on 29 August 1765, was baptised at Whitechapel on 2 September 1765 and was the eldest son of John Rex (1725–92), a distiller of Whitechapel who was sometime Master of the Distillers’ Company, and of his wife Sarah (1730–1803), a widow twice over, who had married in Whitechapel on 17 November 1764.

  George went on to become a Notary Public, being admitted in 1786, and practising in London, thereby becoming an ideally qualified candidate to apply for the post of Marshal and Sergeant-at-Mace of the Vice Admiralty Court at the Cape of Good Hope to which he was appointed on 27 January 1797. George Rex also had a younger brother John and a sister Sarah, whose lives are well chronicled.

  George Rex served as Marshal and Sergeant-at-Mace of the Vice Admiralty Court from 1798 to 1802 when South Africa was handed back to the Dutch. Thereafter he purchased the estate at Knysna piecemeal between 1804-30 where he prospered exceedingly, largely from the extensive sale of timber, in a country where timber was in short supply. Indeed in 1867, his eldest son, George Rex, junior, as a large landowner and leading citizen, was among a number of people to have entertained HRH Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh during his visit to the Cape Colony, although subsequent research has shown that no special significance should be attached to this, as had been claimed.

  Although George Rex never married, he lived successively with two common-law wives (who were mother and daughter to eachother) by whom he had a total of thirteen children (six boys and seven girls). It is probable that the reason that he did not marry, was that he had already been married in London before he came out to South Africa, and could not afford a divorce (which were impossibly expensive), but neither did he want to become a bigamist, having regard to the legal appointment he held. However this has not been substantiated.

  The Rev. Frederick William Blomberg, DD, or Count
Blomberg (1761–1847)

  There is evidence in the Royal Archives to suggest that Blomberg was a Royal Bastard, although probably not of King George III, but rather of one of his brothers.

  In its edition of 24 April 1964, Country Life published an article The Lake that became a Valley, in which it was claimed that the Manor of Kirkby Misperton in Yorkshire had been given in 1812 by the Prince Regent to Count Blomberg, a natural son of George III. This information had come from Alumni Cantabrigienses as well as a brochure issued by the Estate Company and it gave rise to various correspondence, including an article on 27 August 1964 entitled Who was Count Blomberg?

  Certainly the manor had been in the Blomberg family since 1687 when Charles John, Baron Blomberg (1658–1745), Envoy of the Duke of Courland, had married a seventeen year old widow Elizabeth, Lady Shiers. The manor passed to their eldest son, Edmund Charles (1690–1757) – whose arms are on record at the College of Arms - and thence to his nephew, William (1736–74) and to his widow Anne, upon whose death in 1798 it became escheated to the King in right of the Duchy of Lancaster.

  According to the Bigland Collection of the College of Arms (XIII, 81), it appears that Frederick Blomberg was the son of a Frederick Blomberg who was the son of a George Diederic Blomberg who was the grandson of Nicholas de Blomberg, of Courland. This Nicholas was the father of Charles John, Baron Blomberg, mentioned above, who came over with King George I. Thus Nicholas was the great-grandfather of William Blomberg, the testator of Kirby over Car, who was in turn a second cousin once removed to Frederick. However, Frederick would only have been entitled to the arms of Blomberg and/or in remainder to the title of Count, providing that his great- great grandfather Nicholas was a Count (as was his son Edmund) and/or armigerous.